Across Amman, small community initiatives have been shaping their surroundings with steady and patient effort, often outside the spotlight. Over the past two decades, the city has been reshaped by market-driven planning and centralised decisions, yet these neighbourhood efforts continue to make space for shared life. They grow from cooperation, trust, and the quiet bonds formed through everyday acts of care. Some have tended to small parks, some have defended their neighbourhoods from displacement, and others have built projects around food, culture, or the needs of marginalised groups. Each one, in its own way, opens a pocket where a different future for Amman starts to take form.
The countermapping project gathers these stories and places. It documents them through conversations, sketches, memories, and shared reflections, always in dialogue with the people who created and sustained these initiatives. The counter map presents another reading of the city, one that sees these groups not as peripheral actors but as central contributors to the making of place. It brings into view a narrative of city-making that is rarely acknowledged in official planning, and positions these community-led efforts as part of Amman’s ongoing story. By weaving past initiatives with present ones, the map creates a ground for accumulated work. It offers a way to connect groups that often face similar challenges but rarely have the opportunity to meet. In doing so, it opens space for future collaboration, mutual support, and the quiet strengthening of bottom-up practices across different parts of the city.
The map itself sits between the tangible and the imagined. It grows from real stories of people shaping their surroundings every day, yet it also reaches towards what might be possible when grassroots efforts are recognised as part of the city’s fabric. Through this blend of documentation and imagination, the counter map becomes a gentle invitation to picture an Amman shaped by community agency rather than distant planning logics. The process of countermapping brought these groups together in several workshops. We traced the conditions out of which each initiative emerged, spoke about challenges and hopes, and mapped out the social and spatial links that could help them move forward. These meetings revealed patterns across neighbourhoods: shared concerns, overlapping struggles, and a strong desire for spaces where collaboration can grow. They also highlighted the value of collective reflection and the kinds of knowledge that only surface when people share a room, a table, or a sheet of paper.
At its heart, this project gathers collective efforts towards a more participatory way of making the city. It is not a closed or finished project, but one that will continue to grow as more stories, places, and initiatives come into view. The Amman Countermap is open-source, inviting contributions from groups we have not yet reached and welcoming additions as new initiatives form. Through this openness, it becomes a living archive, carrying the hope that community-led practices can shape stronger connections and more grounded futures in Amman.
This project was produced within the framework of the “Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region” grant, with support from Culture Resource, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ettijahat – Independent Culture, Aflamuna Association, and L’Art Rue Association.
